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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

God on their side

By Nell Boyce in Washington DC

PRAYERS can help patients recover even when they don’t know that people are
praying for them, says a provocative new study. Sceptics are far from convinced,
however. They say that while this attempt to probe the healing powers of prayer
was better designed than previous studies, it was still flawed.

Although most research into prayer has found no effect, one study of four
hundred heart patients in 1988 did suggest a positive outcome. But William
Harris of Saint Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, felt that this study
was potentially flawed, since both doctors and their patients knew a study was
in progress—although no one knew which patients received prayer. So Harris
designed a similar study, in which both doctors and patients were kept in the
dark.

Harris and his colleagues secretly enrolled patients who came to the
hospital’s coronary care unit over 12 months. They left out patients having
heart transplants, as well as people who stayed less than 24 hours, since it
took a day to arrange for the prayers. All new patients routinely get a medical
record number in sequential order, and the hospital chaplain’s secretary would
call a volunteer Christian prayer group and give them the first name of any
patient with an even number. The volunteers then prayed for the person daily for
four weeks. Odd-numbered patients served as controls.

To assess patients’ overall recovery, the researchers devised a scoring
system on the basis of variables like fever and whether they were being treated
with antibiotics. They say the scoring system is consistent enough for ten
doctors who scored eleven patients to reach 96 per cent agreement. Based on this
system, the 466 patients in the group who were prayed for had a significantly
better outcome than the 524 patients who received no prayer.

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Harris believes his study is as rigorous as most drugs trials. And it has
gained a stamp of approval by appearing in a journal published by the American
Medical Association. “How open or closed your mind is doesn’t make much
difference if you design it right,” says Harris. “If people are willing to
accept the outcome of a drug study like this, they have to accept this one
too.”

“It’s better than the previous studies, but there are still some issues,”
says Herbert Benson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. But he
notes that no other researchers have validated the scoring system, and questions
the way patients were divided into the two groups. Any ordered system, such as
Harris’s odd and even medical record numbers, raises the possibility of bias
should the secrecy surrounding the trial break down.

Paul Kurz, who chairs the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of
Claims of the Paranormal in Amherst, New York, believes the next step should be
to conduct a similar study in collaboration with members of a sceptical
organisation such as his own. “We would be pleased to provide research work,” he
says. “It has to be a very, very tight protocol.”